This video steps through the advanced settings in Silver Siphon, with some explanations of how the work.

Part 2 then tackles field mapping which can be used to bring additional data into your Stripe Xero bank feed. A great example for this is importing the card country, so that tax rules can be applied automatically.

The new price is 1.75% + 30c per transaction for Australian American Express cards. This is the same price we charge for Australian Mastercard and Visa cards. For international cards, we’ll continue to charge 2.9% + 30c per transaction. As always, the fee for each transaction will be listed in real time in your Dashboard.

There’s no action necessary and we’ve automatically applied the new price to your account. If you have any questions or feedback about this change (or about Stripe in general), please let us know.

Thanks for using Stripe!

This is extremely good news. If you are like me, you love using your Amex for the extra points (I have a semi-addiction to points). Now it doesn’t cost the business anything extra to use it.

To reconcile this, you code the charges to your sales account, whatever that is. It is different for every business, but usually starts with a 2. Like 201.

You then reconcile the fees to your bank fees account. We actually set up a “Stripe fees” account because we separate our fees to our bank, PayPal and Stripe.

The transfer is then reconciled by “matching” the transfer in your main bank account where Stripe deposits the money.

After all of this, the Stripe account balance would be zero.

You can get more advanced by setting up bank rules so that Xero recognises all of these transactions and shows the “OK” button in the middle of a green row. All you have to do is give it a quick glance and click OK on all transactions.

You can do this by creating rules on the data that Silver Siphon brings into Xero. Check out the “Field Mapping” section on the Services page to bring in data and even custom text that you can use in bank rules.

The original version of Silver Siphon has processed over half a million transactions for hundreds of Stripe and Xero users. As you know, the app currently works by adding all your Stripe transactions as a bank feed.

This uses a non conventional, non API approach, which is why Silver Siphon is still the only product that solves this problem (maybe because everyone else knows how difficult it is and thinks we are crazy).

Unfortunately, it looks like it will be a long time before a pure API solution can be used to create a true bank feed. Right now, it is sadly impossible.

That said, we’ve recently been through the process of building out an entirely new way of doing things. These will not only import your transactions, but reconcile completely automatically.

For many of you, this will be an awesome, massive time saving addition. It will not suit everyone though.

We’re working through some hiccups and other things that always come up with this kind of project, but rest assured Silver Siphon version 2 will be out soon 🙂

This has been one of your most requested features for Silver Siphon. Now you can choose which Stripe data to import into Xero.

This makes reconciliation totally customisable to your business, and much easier.

An example use (which comes up all the time) is to detect GST on Australian purchases. Do to this you could map the description as

{charge.description} – {card.country}

This would enable you to set up a bank rule where if the description contains the country, code the transaction to GST Payable. Otherwise, code to no GST payable.

To set up field mapping, scroll down to the bottom of the Services page and look for the link “Configure field mapping for Stripe”.

Click the “Stripe Fields” button to customise the two fields that can be imported to Xero – Customer and Description.

Below is a list of fields currently available. Bear in mind that not all of these fields will always have data. It depends on your set up. Have a look in your Stripe account at which fields are populated before setting up field mapping.

Field Mapping Example

{card.name} – Name on the credit card e.g. John Smith

{card.country} – Country on the credit card. Useful for setting up bank rules for GST or other tax

{card.address.country} – Billing address Country

{card.address.state} – Billing address State

{customer.id} – Stripe Customer ID. This is a unique ID and not a meangingful name.

There is a function in Xero where it tries to detect duplicate transactions.

Duplicates are flagged if there is a transaction of the same amount, on the same day, that is uploaded to Xero on a different day.

For example, imagine you have two a $50 transactions on one day. One is delayed for some reason, and payment is received two days later, but the transaction date is the original date. That second one would appear in Xero two days later with the same date and amount.

Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t look at the payment description or payee. Only the date and the amount. That transaction will be deleted without a notification to you.

If you have got the dreaded “Unable to upload transactions to your Xero account” email, then this one is for you!

There are a few reasons why this might happen. Please check that:

The user admin@silversiphon.com has been invited to the Xero account

There is a new “Stripe” account in Xero which you created just for Silver Siphon (or you already had it for manual reconciliation). It should be visible on the dashboard of your Xero account

Accounts must not be locked. If there is even one transaction in Stripe/Silver Siphon that overlaps with a locked period in Xero, the entire sync will fail*. You can set this by going to Settings -> Financial Settings in Xero

*This is because we missing one or two transaction causes a much bigger bookkeeping headache than missing an entire statement.